Free The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai Page A

to stand there. This colossus, over sixty feet high, a constant reminder of the great floods of the nearby River Körös, a wonderful shelter for hordes of sparrows and a monument which for generations had been the marvel of the town, was lying, lifeless, against the hotel’s Hétvezér Square façade, straddled across the entire extent of the square, prevented from collapsing into the alley between only by thick branches entangled in the half-collapsed guttering; it wasn’t that the trunk had been snapped in two by some violent gust, nor that it had been eaten away by worms and years of acid rain: the whole thing, roots and all, had split the hard concrete of the road. It was only to be expected that one day this ancient of days should eventually collapse, but that it should happen now, that the roots should release their hold at this precise moment, held a peculiar significance for Mrs Eszter. She stared at the ghastly apparition, at the tree lying diagonally across the dark square, then, with the knowing smile of one initiated into such things, remarked: ‘Of course. How could it be otherwise?’ and with this secret smile playing about her lips continued on her way in the secret knowledge that the sequence of ‘miracles’ and ‘omens’ was far from over. And she was not wrong. A mere few steps later, her eye, hungry now for more strange phenomena, lit on a small group of people silently loitering down Liget Street, whose presence here at this hour—for it was an act of courage to venture out of doors after dark in a town currently bereft of streetlighting—was wholly inexplicable. As to who they might be and what they wanted here at this time, she couldn’t begin to imagine, and truth to tell she wasn’t particularly bothered to try, for she immediately read this, along with the water-tower, the church clock and the state of the poplar tree, as simply another harbinger of the resurrection from ruins that was sure to follow; however, when, at the end of the boulevard, she entered the arena of Kossuth Square’s bare acacias and discovered group upon group of silently waiting people, a hot flush ran straight through her, since it suddenly occurred to her that it was not wholly impossible that after many long months (‘Years! Years! …’), after all her enduring and certain faith (‘Perhaps! …), the decisive moment when preparation would give way to action might actually have come and ‘the prophecy be fulfilled’. As far as she could see from this side of the square, roughly fifty to sixty men in twos or threes stood on the icy flat-trodden grass of the market-place: their feet shod in waterproof boots or heavy brogues, wearing caps with ear-flaps or greasy peasant hats on their heads and, here and there, hands clutching cigarettes that glowed into sudden life. Even under these conditions, in the darkness, it wasn’t hard to see that they were all outsiders, and the fact that fifty or sixty strangers should stand about in numbing cold at such a late hour of the evening was in itself more than surprising. Their dumb immobility seemed all the more peculiar and more spellbinding to Mrs Eszter, for it was like glimpsing the angels of the apocalypse in mufti at the end of the street. Though she should have crossed the square diagonally, cutting through by the most direct route to her flat in Honvéd Passage, just off the square, she felt a twinge—only a twinge, mind—of fear, and skirted their irregular ranks by pursuing an L shape round them, holding her breath and flitting like a shadow, till she reached the far side. Having arrived at the corner of Honvéd Passage and glancing back one last time, she was, if not exactly flabbergasted, certainly deeply disappointed to discover the enormous form of the circus vehicle, a circus whose arrival had been well advertised (though without a fixed date), for it was clear to her in a moment that the crowd behind her were not so much ‘the disguised heralds of the